Women may require more oxygen uptake than men for same fitness task

February 4, 2015 4:04 PM

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If you set a healthy man and a healthy woman in a room, put them on stationary bikes with an identical amount of resistance, and ask them to exercise for the same amount of time, the woman’s respiratory muscles will demand more oxygen to complete the task. That’s what a new study published Tuesday in The Journal of Physiology concludes, and the findings may suggest a sex-based difference in the way oxygen is processed in the human body.

Previous research has indicated that women’s airways are narrower than men’s— even between two people with lungs of equal size— and, thus, that moving the same amount of oxygen through these channels costs more for women than for men, study author William Sheel, kinesiology professor at the Universi...